


This Darkness Which You Know You Cannot Fight

by cuddlesome



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Dark Side Rey, Everything Hurts, F/M, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Rey isn't afraid, The Dark Side of the Force, Violent Thoughts, she feels it too
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-01
Updated: 2017-01-01
Packaged: 2018-09-12 17:11:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,574
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9081847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cuddlesome/pseuds/cuddlesome
Summary: Rey gives in to her anger. It has been a long time coming.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [OccasionallyCreative](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OccasionallyCreative/gifts).



> "Rey finds out she keeps tapping into the Dark side of the Force after her duel with Kylo on Starkiller Base. She's both frightened, but wants to know more at the same time."
> 
> Happy 2017, Occasionally Creative! Hope you enjoy the melodramatic angst I came up with for this prompt. Thank you to my betas witchoil and bittersnake! I really appreciated your guys' advice. Thanks to the entire Ring in the Reylo group; this was a super fun event.

Rey never knew that her mind was dark.

 

And why would she? She was no monster garbed all in black, leering at enemies from behind a mask. There was no pleasure for her in anger and bleakness and devastation even when they seemed to follow her regardless.

 

Anger especially always snapped at her heels like an unwanted kath pup that grew into a beastly kath hound. The shape of her rage was ugly and toothy from the start, but when it was little she could kick it away. Then it got bigger. Big enough to bite her heels bloody and crush her will and howl until her ears rang. Soon enough, she got tired of running from it.

 

The hound paced behind Rey when she stood over Kylo Ren on Starkiller.

 

 _Finish him_ , it growled, and for a long, horrible moment, Rey almost obeyed.

 

Ren looked up at her with dullness in his usually blazing eyes. If not for the way he supported himself on one elbow and the clouds of vapor seeping from his mouth due to the cold air, Rey might think he was dead already.

 

She could feel the hounding at her back and was suddenly frightened. What was she doing?

 

The features in Kylo Ren’s face that resembled his father's were suddenly in sharp relief. What would Han Solo think if he knew that the very thing that had corrupted his son was turned on him? And that Rey wielded it? Would he want Rey to avenge him and kill—

 

She did not get a chance to finish the thought as fate decided to intervene. A chasm separated her from the potential victim of the whisperings at Rey’s back. She shivered as she turned off the lightsaber that she had a death grip on and fled, sparing only a glance for the mess of dark cloth and burns and blood and a near-black stare behind.

 

If only the bloodlust were so easily abandoned. It howled louder in her ears as she sobbed into Finn’s chest. She believed the claims the hound made; that Kylo Ren deserved everything he got and more.

 

But—

 

Wouldn’t holding on to such beliefs make her just as bad as him?

 

No, Rey told herself firmly, being as bad as him was impossible, no matter what cruel impulses she had. She hoped that the reassurance would make the barking quiet. It did not. The kath hound followed her onto the _Falcon_ , a constant reminder of how she broke under the pressure of her own anger, only ever out of her sight during the blissfully blinding white light that came as Starkiller exploded.

 

All the while, Rey neglected to give a name to it, but the words _dark side_ were seared into the back of her eyelids when she tried to sleep that night just the same.

 

Rey may have had trouble recognizing the darkness within herself at first, but Luke Skywalker had no such issue. He rejected her the moment he saw her. He cited the darkness in her heart before he turned away. Rey let the lightsaber she held drop from her outstretched hand out of shock and with it the light that she struggled to hold to her faded.

 

The next time Rey got into a fight with someone—it was at an outpost whose name she blocked from her memory, along with what started the fight in the first place—she stopped their heart with a thought. In a way, it was far worse than when she had shot the stormtrooper on Takodana and felt deep in the Force that the life had left them. In the later instance, she had bent the Force itself to her will and used it to kill out of petty anger rather than self-defense.

 

They may have had the same look Kylo Ren had as he lay defeated, with dull eyes and the sudden grim acceptance that they were about to die, but in this case Rey had no mercy. She put down her blaster. It had served its purpose in shooting her victim in the kneecap to cripple them. Then she lifted her hand, fingers spread, and squeezed. Although she could not see the chambers of their heart, she could feel a ghost of the shape of the rapidly beating organ in her hand as she crushed it.

 

Rey fled from the Resistance. It was clear she was more of a danger than an asset. She left behind her friends, convinced that she would one day brutalize them just like the nameless victim and Kylo Ren if she did not.

 

The next time she saw him, she had the kath hound by her side rather than trailing behind her. Rey stared at him from across a table in a seedy bar in the Outer Rim. She was too drunk and tired to be afraid of the monster that had stalked her across the galaxy.

 

The only unnerving thing was the way that Ren’s eyes smoldered with new fire, so she let her gaze slip to the scarred over place where the lightsaber burned his right cheek. She could not help thinking that his outsides resembled his insides more faithfully with the defilement of his face.

 

Part of his scar crinkled revoltingly in on itself as he smiled. “If only you were so lucky.”

 

Ren’s smile widened when she shoved him from her mind with a concentrated burst of the Force, far more quickly than she did when fighting him in the interrogation room on Starkiller. He came back into her head just as quickly, extending a hand toward her, coming close to cupping her cheek.

 

“I can feel it in you. I can feel the darkness.” Ren pinned her with his smoldering stare. "You show a veneer of light to those around you, but I see where it fades."

 

Rey found that she could not turn her head or blink or dislodge the probe he had sunk deep into her brain.

 

She hated him. She hated that he was right.

 

She had come to accept the darkness that flowed through her veins and dictated her every move. With that acceptance came morbid curiosity. It took her self-proclaimed teacher to push her to pursue it.

 

“Use your anger!” He hissed, holding her face in both of his hands, pressing their foreheads together. “Embrace the darkness!”

 

Ren’s forehead was warm despite its unhealthy cast. His gloved hands were the first to have ever touched Rey’s face so intimately. She had the most absurd wish for him to hold her closer.

 

The glass that held Rey’s drink shattered in her hand. Ren pulled away.

 

Rey gave him a new scar with her blaster that day in the resulting battle, one that ended in a massacre of half of the patrons of the bar. The hound howled with delight. During the fray, they short-circuited the lights so that only Kylo Ren’s lightsaber cast a flickering glow.

 

At the end of it all, Rey embraced the darkness that otherwise surrounded him all the same.

 

Huffing with exhaustion and overwhelming fury, she picked through the gloom so she could lean her cheek against the space where Ren’s heart throbbed in his chest. His heart rate increased when she called him master. Rey accepted Ren's gut-crushing hug, his hungry kisses, and his insistence to carry her away from the wreckage in his arms. She curled up in his grasp, pulled his warm monk's cloth cowl around herself, and took in the outpouring of adoration from him that she knew she did not deserve. She did not look in his eyes. They were ablaze with far too much light.

 

In a way, Rey realized she had been doomed from the start. Jakku wore her down, stripping her of flesh and humanity. She lived in an environment where she was made into a furious thing that fought with everything she had or otherwise have it taken from her, like a wild dog. Even though she did not know she possessed the Force at that time, she was a poster child for the dark side to take her: afraid for her fate, angry at the unfairness of being abandoned, and hating every moment of her miserable life on a planet full of trash. But then, she was just a scavenger, not a monster infused with the dark side. Not what she became alongside Kylo Ren and his knights.

 

There was little room in her outlook for the compassion that both strengthened and crippled Ren. Ren seemed to have convinced himself that he, a being torn between light and darkness, could fit the mismatched pieces of one in with the other; all the while, he claimed to only be one with the dark side. He was a hypocrite.

 

“The dark side allows for the purest, most passionate kind of love.” Ren said to Rey as he sparred with her one night. “It was what initially compelled my grandfather to accept its power.”

 

“Love.” Rey wondered when the day would come that she finally listened to her feelings and murdered Kylo Ren. “Was it love that you felt when you killed your father?”

 

In response, Ren bashed Rey in the temple with his fist. The blow left her in the pitch-black realm of unconsciousness, a place with no death, kath hounds, or eyes set aflame for a solid three minutes. She had never been more grateful to him.

**Author's Note:**

> Keeping up with my trend of references lately:
> 
> The title is a reference to the song "The Music of the Night" from Andrew Lloyd Webber's "The Phantom of the Opera."
> 
> There is also a reference to the song "Don't You Dare Forget the Sun" by Get Scared in the first line.
> 
> Kath hounds are horned doglike creatures from Dantooine that were tainted with the dark side and made violent in the game Knights of the Old Republic.
> 
> There are also a couple of lines repeated verbatim from Kylo Ren in the Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens video game and one line paraphrases a bit of the dialogue his cast member says at Disney World.


End file.
